I am in awe of this machine! It is beyond all comparison the most advanced piece of engineering ever built by the human race. In the LHC, "packets" of protons that have been accellerated to >99.99999% of the velocity of light - and then been charged and charged again until they are at a level of over 7000 times their resting state mass - are smashed together in head on collisions to simulate the conditions of space one millionth of a second after "the big bang". And... just to put it into perspective: A uranium atom is only 235 times the mass of one proton...

I watched a speech by Richard Dawkins where he said he had mistyped it such as that for his book (I don't remember which one) but he hoped that the correction reader wouldn't spot it. However, she did... and his plea to leave it like that wasn't heard.

But I suppose "7000 times the resting mass" would be a wee bit too much of a large hardon for most of us anyway.

It will supposedly take the guys at CERN at least two years to start getting some practical test results, but I really hope that this thing is worth it's price (dubbed the "most expensive science experiment ever").

What's more important, the LHC can greatly increase human knowledge about how the Universe works... which may simply mean abuse of power.

the LHC can greatly increase human knowledge about how the Universe works... which may simply mean abuse of power.

You are of course correct.

All power has the potential for being abused. However, I find it hard to see any direct correlation between top level theoretical physics being confirmed by even more top level experiments, and the kind of political manipulation which consequences can be experienced by the publc at large.

But of course, common sense never stops a good conspiracy theorist! It is quite interesting to observe all the crazy "2012+LHC" ideas that are floating around in the rudimentary monkey minds of superstitious people. If you have nothing better to do one fine Sunday morning, you can hop a little here and there on YouTube and witness the zoo of crazy people who think the world will end at any given moment...

OK, I'm gonna add this explanation to some more of the details about what they are actually trying to do in the LHC. I guess I should add that I am not a "standard model" man myself; I am more into M-theory (which is an elaboration on the superstring model) - but I may of course be wrong (most scientists are considering M-theory unproveable and therefore not really "science" per se), but this is still a very good lecture on the subject:

All power has the potential for being abused. However, I find it hard to see any direct correlation between top level theoretical physics being confirmed by even more top level experiments, and the kind of political manipulation which consequences can be experienced by the publc at large.

True, but what if the LHC completely changes the top level physics theory? The whole idea behind this accelerator is to give men a lot of new knowledge.Sure, this may not mean political abuse - that is if course if LHC won't lead to any weapon's development, but what about environment (Universe) abuse?

Originally Posted By: XUL

But of course, common sense never stops a good conspiracy theorist! It is quite interesting to observe all the crazy "2012+LHC" ideas that are floating around in the rudimentary monkey minds of superstitious people. If you have nothing better to do one fine Sunday morning, you can hop a little here and there on YouTube and witness the zoo of crazy people who think the world will end at any given moment...

Yeah, I was surprised when after the release of "2012" there was an incereased surge of people to the church, because they thought that the end-of-the-world really was coming. But, what can you expect...

I was having a very pleasing discussion with my girlfriend about this just the other day (before it all collapsed into... well, nevermind); where The Higgs Field was presumed to be a sort of the basic matrix of the universe, and "dark matter" is a gravitational tug from the parts of the field that doesn't interact with matter as we know it. I am absolutely fascinated by the field of tension between the standard model of physics and the standard model of cosmology. Now if they can only produce a Higgs Boson, then everything unites into a higher state of order...

I understand the LHC has the potential to help open up areas of science we didn't even know existed, but when looking at recreating the Big Bang, one thing concerns me. Remember that the Big Bang was a universe sized explosion. Even if the recreation was only a fraction that sized, couldn't it still be pretty disastrous? I mean, I'm no physicist, but when we split the atom the result was Hiroshima. Now we're taking parts of atoms and ramming them together at near light speed? That just sounds like a recipe for bad.It's strange, as much as I stand in awe of this thing, I'm also terrified by it...almost like it's a god.

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"The truth requires no belief. Not an ounce of faith or trust. Only examples of it's veracity." -Wormwood

Nope, when we first split the atom, it was 1917. It wasn't until people discovered the possibility of Nuclear Chain Reactions (where Atoms produce the right components to continue the Nuclear Fission, or splitting), back in 1933, that it was even thought about as being a fuel source.

A Nuclear Bomb only explodes because it is a chain reaction that is set up to run on until a critical point. And the mass inside that bomb contains well over billions of atoms. It's when the many many many atoms all splitting that you get the explosion.

Now, in the LHC, atoms are collided together using intense Electromagnetic fields which accelerate them to near light speed. It takes an awful lot of energy to accelerate anything to near light speed. (In fact, it takes a nearly infinite amount of energy to get to light speed, but that's another story).

Once those accelerated atoms collide, the majority of the energy is lost. It's that energy loss that gives us the particles that we're looking for. So unless someone's got a way of shrinking all the accelerators into a bomb shaped device, there's no chance of an explosion.

And if you're worried about it becoming a massive implosion (i.e. a black hole) then that's not going to happen either.

The energy used at the LHC is too low to produce a black hole, according to the Standard Model of particle physics. Extensions to that model predict that micro black holes may form. But micro black holes will vanish because all black holes release Hawking Radiation and micro holes can't absorb enough energy to keep themselves stable.

The LHC is awe inspiring, yes. But it's not something to be terrified of. Like any other tool of humanity, it's how it's used that matters.

(and hopefully this post makes sense, as I was going to throw numbers in and then decided that might not help)